Witnesses haunted by what they saw when pickup plowed through a Kansas youth soccer game
Witnesses of Saturday’s deadly collision in which a pickup truck barreled through a youth soccer game in Kansas, killing two people and injuring nearly a dozen, said they are haunted by what they saw and heard.Cole Adrian, 6, and Nicholas Schafer, 35, were killed in the incident that unfolded shortly before 3:30 p.m.in Wichita at the city-owned Stryker Sports Complex, police said.The deceased were both from McPherson, Kansas, but were not related to each other, a spokesperson for the Wichita Police Department said.
Ten others, between 5 and 68 years old, were also hit and hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, Wichita Police Capt.Aaron Moses said.Police said a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup drove onto a field during a youth soccer game and struck children and adults.Erica Case said it was halftime during her 9-year-old son’s soccer game on an adjacent field when she first heard an engine revving followed by several “boom” sounds.“I saw the truck hitting things.
I saw debris flying in the air,” she recalled.“I don’t know if it was a cone, a chair or a person, but you could see matter flying as the truck was barreling through the soccer field at a at a decent rate of speed.”She said the sound will haunt her.“The moment that I recognized that that wasn’t gunshots, that that was bodies, I lost it,” Case said.
“I lost it because it wasn’t just adults.It was also children.” Police were investigating what caused the pickup to barrel through a soccer field, killing a man and child.
David GriekspoorCase recalled the mother of another boy shouting that she was a nurse and needed to get to the injured.Case said she told her she’d watch her boy and then took the woman’s son to safety amid the chaos.
It took about 10 minutes for emergency services to arrive, she said, but people began helping the victims during that time.“There are a lot of silent heroes that I know experienced much worse than I did, having to do mouth-to-mouth o...